Facelift of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization: Does Softer Balancing Continue?

Abstract

For the past 15 years, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) has preserved its non-Western (and sometimes anti-Western) identity and its policy toward the West has been based on a "soft-balancing" strategy. This paper aims to examine the SCO's identity positioning and understand the implications of its strategy and policy toward the West in terms of three recent global events relating to the SCO. India's membership effect will be able to soften the SCO's image of the club of authoritarian states or an anti-Western group as well as to make less-assertive its non-Western identity. China's economic power projection aiming at the "peaceful rise" is inclined to make the SCO's identity less anti-Western. Russia's policy of expanding partners and widening cooperation in greater Eurasia is also likely to weaken not only the rhetoric, but also the substance of the anti-Western narrative. The SCO's shift of identity positioning, in general, from the non-Western to a less assertive non-Western is likely to soften the SCO's soft balancing against the West, and the anticipated range and effect of the softer balancing could be greater due to the widened platform and the improved image.